DFC Intelligence forecasts that the greatest growth area for the game industry is PC games and games for other mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets. The good news is that these areas by and large expand the audience and do not take away from the existing business. “Games on Facebook and products like the iPad help expand the audience and the way products are delivered. The console business is firmly established and suffers mainly from the reluctance of hardware manufacturers to commit to expensive new products,” claims Cole.

Rhett wrote on Sep 7, 2011, 22:01:I'd still go out of my way for a physical copy. You just know that publishers won't go for a cheaper price, when going digital.

Definitely... though my impression is that Steam has more frequent sales on decent stuff more often than Brick-And-Mortar shops around me. But the regular prices are the same.

Retailers will price things at what the market is willing to pay. If people are willing to pay the same price for a downloadable game vs a disk + box then they'll leave it there.

They're not going to say "Hey, let's lower prices so our profits don't increase" unless they decide they want to drive all sales through their own sites and put the stores out of the PC-Gaming game. But they won't do that because they're going to want to keep selling disks in stores to kids using their allowance + birthday money + etc or for those that don't have broadband.

I'm pretty sure online comics from Comixology are the same price as print, even though I have to imagine the publishers + site saving a lot of cash on materials + printing + shipping + storage. But the convenience of having having them OnDemand (even when travelling) and saving a bunch of shelf space negates that complaint for me.

"Space. It seems to go on and on forever. But then you get to the end and a gorilla starts throwing barrels at you." -Fry, Futurama

Surely this has been the case for PC gaming for years? I have only bought a handful of titles at retail in the past 6-7 years, with Battlefield 2 (2005), The Witcher (2007) and Starcraft 2 (2010) being the only exceptions I recall. Two of those games were later released on Steam, which I picked up to avoid dealing with disks. I assume this forecast is for when consoles will catch up.

I buy 99% of my games on Steam and keep all of them installed for practicality. I have over 1TB of games installed, ready to play in an instant. I can trade games, view the length of time each game has been played for, compare achievements and voice chat with friends. Gaming has never been better. And this year is a cracker, with The Witcher 2, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Skyrim, Portal 2, Battlefield 3 (bleh to Origin), etc.

I just hope that publishers respond and stop resorting to stupid promotions with physical retailers. Isn't it about time that PC games releases were worldwide, rather than 3-4 days apart? Isn't it time that EU and Australasia prices match the UK/US? And as for gaming, why can't a game support Steamworks AND Origin's / Impulse's / Green Man Gaming's / Desura's platform features? We don't want to be creating a monopoly, so developers and publishers should really look to recreate all features on all platforms where possible.

Are you serious? Has anyone reading bluesnews actually played a game on facebook? What are we talking about here? Card games? Dice? Jeoperdy? Wheel of fortune? How can that possibly effect purchases of games like Deus Ex, RAGE, etc?